


A Man Called Winter

by ReyloTrashCompactor (NextToSomething)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Hades and Persephone, Reylo - Freeform, Reylo Fanfiction Anthology, hades and persephone - freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-15 23:33:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8077624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NextToSomething/pseuds/ReyloTrashCompactor
Summary: The girl didn’t dream. Perhaps it was because she needed more to fuel nighttime sojourns than fantasies of a full belly, of escaping the desert. Perhaps she exhausted all these dreams years ago, falling to sleep in the soft embrace of hope and waking in the hard grip of reality.Or perhaps dreams simply could not permeate the armored shell she slept inside, those rusted walls resistant to blaster fire as well as the simple comfort of imagination.Maybe this was why, on a particularly stifling night, when sleeping on her gritty pallet in the too-still air finally proved unbearable, and she had rucked the mess of salvaged pilot seats and threadbare blankets into the sand outside her door, that he came to her first. She laid under the stars, straining her exhausted body for a cool breeze, and found sleep.And he found her.





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a part of the reylofanfictionanthology on Tumblr, this is a (loose) retelling of the myth of Hades and Persephone. This is the longest and hardest I have ever worked on a completed piece, and I am so, so excited to finally be posting it. Thank you to my fellow mods for making this project possible and for all of your tireless work. You are the salt of the earth and I will forever love you for the care and dedication you have put into this project.
> 
> Any feedback or comments are extremely welcome, and I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. 
> 
> And thank you, as always, to my wonderful beta. Thanks to southsidestory for being you and for going extra hard on this piece. It’s better for it.
> 
> Part two will be posted very soon. Like, tomorrow.

**Part I**

**The girl didn’t dream.** **Perhaps it was** because she needed more to fuel nighttime sojourns than fantasies of a full belly, of escaping the desert. Perhaps she exhausted all these dreams years ago, falling to sleep in the soft embrace of hope and waking in the hard grip of reality. _They aren’t coming back for you. They never will._

Or perhaps dreams simply could not permeate the armored shell she slept inside, those rusted walls resistant to blaster fire as well as the simple comfort of imagination.

Maybe this was why, on a particularly stifling night, when sleeping on her gritty pallet in the too-still air finally proved unbearable, and she had rucked the mess of salvaged pilot seats and threadbare blankets into the sand outside her door, that he came to her first. She laid under the stars, straining her exhausted body for a cool breeze, and found sleep.

And he found her.

She noticed the cold first: hard and biting and sharp. She’d never known a chill like this, even in the coldest of desert nights, but she remembered an old holo she liked to read when she was young. It described things called seasons, and winter had always fascinated her the most. She lived in a perpetual summer, and the slicing frigidity of winter was something as far removed from her as the stars in the sky.

This cold, bitter and hard, seemed to crystalize in her lungs, and pieces of it, pieces of _cold_ , fell around her. Fell on her sun-warmed skin and turned to-- _water?_  She brought her wrist to her lips and tasted. Water.

_Snow._

She whirled around at the thought. It wasn’t her own, and yet she had felt it. Heard it. She turned back, and that is when she first saw him.

He was massive, more than a full head taller than her and impossibly broad. Hooded, cloaked in all black, pelts hanging from his shoulders that shone dully in the crepuscular light. All of them black. It was a color she barely recognized, so rarely was it seen in her desert home. It was the color of someone who was not staying long.

He reached out and took her hand, cradling it in a large, gloved palm. Cold fell on her open hand, turning less quickly to water the more chilled she got. He lifted her hand to his shadowed face. She could only see snatches of him, pale skin and full mouth, as he bent and licked the cold from her skin with a slow pass of his startlingly hot tongue.

_Snow._

She pulled her hand away, holding it tight to her chest. Beneath it, she could feel her heart hammering against her sternum. She tried to see up into the shadows of his hooded cloak. But no sooner had she stepped forward did he step back, further into the frozen and the black.

_And what are you called?_

His voice was strange, and inside her head. More thought than syllable. She walked after him, deeper into the dark, and this time, he did not move away. She reached up and pushed away his hood, exposing his face to what dim light was left in the shadows that pressed in around them. Dark hair and a long face almost the same color as the _snow._ Mostly nose and mouth but oddly beautiful. Eyes that made her want to look away. She thought again of his tongue on her skin, and she did look away, staring hard at the snow slowly covering her numbed bare feet.

“I’m called Rey.”

* * *

 

She stopped sleeping out of doors, but the dreams didn’t cease. He found her, somehow, as if that first dream was all he needed.

He spoke of teaching her things, of more than just the name of the cold falling around her.

_You have a power, one for which you don’t even have a name. I can teach you to wield it. You are like me, Rey.  You are like me._

But she refused. Rey had no use for power. She had use of valuable parts, extracted from valueless wreckage. What could bring her a full stomach is what she found useful. Not some nameless power that made her like the man she called Winter.

But she didn’t turn him away.

He touched her. Her face, her arms. Her hair. He liked to take it down from its bindings, pull his fingers gently through the snarls until he could reach her scalp.

Rey wasn’t used to being touched, and she found that she welcomed his, as much as it confused her. She would lean into the feel of his cool leather gloves, arch her back. He liked that. He’d lick his full lips as her body bowed, trail fingers up to her collarbones, run hard, pressing fingers down the valley between her breasts. Feeling the dips between her ribs. This made him frown, the hunger that was as visible as the jut of her bones.

When she was brave, she would smooth away this frown with trembling fingers, and he’d kiss their tips, then duck his head lower.

They weren’t in the desert, but rather someplace green and flowering and yet dusted with snow. He would bring the cold, wrapped in furs and dark and smelling of hard frost. She would turn toward him and petals would fall from her hair. Fallen flowers crushed beneath her bare feet in the snow, wafting heady perfume with each step. He’d pull her down into these blossoms and snow. Cold and warm, sleeping and blooming.

She’d wake from these dreams hot and wet, slick between her thighs, embarrassment burning across her cheeks. Then she’d pull her hair back up-- _it always fell down in her sleep now--_ and set out for a day of work.

* * *

 

Rey was hungry. The more vivid her dreams became, she realized she was finding less and less salvage of any sort of value. She had to travel farther and farther each time, pick through wreckage more pieces than whole only to find nothing of worth. Once she exhausted her store of portions, she packed a bag with enough water for an overnight trip and left on her speeder. She’d have to go farther than she’d gone in a long time, but she couldn’t continue like this.

She drove until the light of the sun gave out on her before spotting a large, dark shape growing closer on the horizon. It seemed intact enough, though she couldn’t see it’s true state in the dark. She could only hope the morning would bring good news. She parked her speeder and pried open a side door of the massive ship, flicking her flashlight around enough to assure that she was alone before fashioning herself a bed. For now, she would sleep, then begin fresh in the morning.

* * *

 

This dream was different. She couldn’t see him this time, could only feel him. All of him. Dark, no snow, no flowers. His lips were on her, hot, open-mouth kisses on bare skin that left her shaking. His hands were bare, and the skin of his palms was rough, cool. He peeled her clothes from her body, and as soon as the skin was exposed, he would explore it with lips and tongue and teeth. He tugged a nipple into his mouth, laved it with his tongue in relentless, repetitive strokes. His fingers raked up her back as he sucked at her, and she was making such noises. Such noises.

She reached out to him, then. Wanting to feel his body beneath her fingers for once. She found his neck, deliberated, traveled up rather than down. His mouth was hard at her breast, and she traced over the hollows of his cheeks, his pronounced brow, up into his hair.

_It’s soft._ Thick and fine and wavy. She scratched her short nails along his scalp, and he groaned against her. He dragged his mouth up her body, never breaking contact, until he reached her lips. She leaned forward for that kiss, hands still in his hair, and he dodged away at the last moment, planting a wet kiss across her cheek to her ear instead. His hands moved on her--hard, bruising paths up her spine and then _down._

When he found her wet, he made a noise against her ear that sounded like pain. And she answered with a sound like need. He slipped a finger inside her and made that noise again, like she was hurting  him with how much her body, how much _she_ craved him.

She wanted to moan his name, but she didn’t know it. She wanted to kiss his mouth, but he wouldn’t give it. She wanted to feel his body, but he kept it covered. As if his face were elucidated riddle enough, even in the complete dark of this dream.

She wanted a release, and this he gave. He coaxed a wave of pleasure from her with the tip of his finger and she shuddered to think what else he could draw from her, given half the chance.

She awoke still quaking, her clothes skewed and her lips unkissed. She groaned in frustration and clawed at the lumpy pallet of pilot seat cushions she had called a bed. It was morning, and it was time to see what this ship would yield her.

* * *

 

Too much to carry, it would seem. It was as if this wreck had been left completely untouched since falling from the sky. Pieces and parts she only knew about from engine mechanic holos, so rare were they to find. Supplies packed away in air-tight cases. Enough portions to feed her for six months, which she immediately began stuffing into her bag. Then she took armload after armload of converters and thrusters and compressors to her speeder, cramming as much as she could into the nets along the side. On her last trip to her speeder, arms full of enough salvage to keep her fed for months, she saw him.

_Him._

Actually him, though she should have no way of knowing it. He was large and dressed in relentless black-- _no fur_ \--and _masked,_ looking more machine than man. She shouldn’t know from some otherworldly sense alone that this huge creature standing cloaked in inky layers wholly unsuitable for the desert was _him_ , but she did.

“Winter,” she said as the valuable parts fell from her arms and scattered across the sand, like so many flowers. The ground seemed to open up beneath her feet, though that was impossible, and he caught her. She didn’t realize she’d been falling until she was in his arms. This felt more like her dreams, though she was on Jakku. She was on Jakku!  But there was snow, there were flowers, the fur of his cloak was tickling her skin and she was wearing a long, long white dress. He looked down at her, though she couldn’t see his eyes through the glass and metal and _machine_ of his mask, and spoke.

“Rey.”


	2. Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two more parts after this!

**Part II**

**She knew instantly that she was no** longer in the desert. She was no longer on Jakku.

Once, when she was much younger and much more foolish, she was invited into the cockpit of a freighter stopping over at Niima Outpost. She had looked at the panel of the ship, alight and functioning, sat in the pilot’s chair, laid her hands on the controls. What she remembered most about this--before the merchant had propositioned her for a more thorough tour, _no matter that she was only 14 years old--_ was how cool the ship was. Climate control was something she had only ever thought of in the abstract. She knew what parts were needed to construct an air conditioner, a heating unit (though she’d never known cold strong enough that she’d want to drive it away), but the reality of it, beyond pieces that she turned in for portions, was completely foreign to her.

She’d escaped the freighter before the merchant could overpower her, and had taken more than a few lessons with her. She’d never boarded another ship that could steal her away. Never trusted a friendly offer of a visiting dealer.

But she remembered the feel of controls new and operational beneath her hands, not broken by a crash landing and barely recognizable. And the feel of cool air driving away the dry heat of Jakku.

That is what this room felt like.

“Where am I?” she asked.

She was lying in a bed. A bed. Fitted in black sheets and black blankets and black covered pillows. Pillows. Things she’d never known, in a color she rarely saw.

“You’re my guest.”

She turned toward the voice, recognizing it from the single, mechanical word spoken in her ear before the world fell away and she knew more black than she’d ever imagined.

She sat up, pulling herself from the pillows. He stood against the wall, that mask still in place. Hands behind his back, unmoving and unobtrusive.

She backed away anyway, scrambling across the bed until her spine met the headboard and she was sitting among the pillows. She was still wearing her clothes. Was still sandy and dirty and slightly burned from a day walking back and forth in the sun. He hadn’t touched her, had only laid her in this bed.

 _Is this_ his _bed?_

“Take off your mask,” she demanded. She knew it was him, though she couldn’t recognize his voice through the helm. She knew it was him, though she’d never actually met him. But still she wanted to see. She wanted the know for certain.

He pushed himself off the wall and reached to his mask. It released with a hiss, and he set it on the foot of the bed. Something about this, about laying his helmet gently on the silken black sheets, was oddly intimate. Rey pulled her knees to her chest.

Then he looked up. She couldn’t keep the gasp contained as she looked up at that face she knew so well, and yet had never actually seen. She knew what those lips could do to her skin, how those gloved hands felt on her body, and yet--

“Who are you?” she asked.

He considered her for a moment. His face was very serious, that soft mouth set into an impossibly hard line. Then he raised his chin and answered.

“I am Kylo Ren.”

_Kylo Ren._

She knew that name. She knew it spoken in fear and in whispers and in association with _Dark_ and _First Order_ and _death._ Kylo Ren was the scourge that would crush you so soon as you drew breath before him. He could kill you by looking at you, though she didn’t know how. They said he collected the dead--and here she was, in his possession.

“Why am I here?” She knew the answer to this question. He’d said it to her so many times before, but she wanted to hear it now, awake and from his lips. Not spoken into her mind as strong gloved hands raked over her body like it was already his.

His mouth twitched.

“You need a teacher.”

She scrambled from the bed, pillows falling to the floor. She reached out, but she didn’t know for what. Her staff. It was here. And her bag. She grabbed them both, didn’t stop to think why he would willingly bring along her bag of portions and her weapon.

“You’re safe here, Rey,” he said, and his _voice_. His voice climbed over and through her. He spoke with an odd accent, deep and calculated. Like he took great care with the shape of his words, tasting them in his mouth then speaking life to their flavor.

“Where is here?” she asked.

He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped. Deciding whether or not to lie to her, she thought.

“The Underground, is what I call it.”

She smirked, though she scrubbed the expression away with the back of her hand. It was a truth and a lie, she knew. He called it the Underground, but that was not its name.

He was clever.

“And why do you call it that?”

It was his turn to smirk. It suited that carnal mouth much better than the grimace he tried to maintain.

“Because it is full of those who are as good as dead.”

She gripped her staff harder, though he made no move toward her. Instead, he took a step away and indicated the weapon she gripped in shaking hands.

“You need a teacher,” he repeated.

“I’ve done just fine on my own, thank you,” she retorted, and aimed the staff at him to prove it.

Then.

He waved his hand and the staff was snatched from her fingers. He caught it and laid it aside. Across the bed. She could feel heat rise to her face and again she scrubbed at her skin. She was tired of her body betraying her around him.

“How did you do that?”

“I will tell you in our first lesson. Come with me, and I will show you the ways of the Force.”

“No,” she said before she could think better of it. _The Force._ A myth, surely. Another part of her holos from childhood, a fanciful form of magic wielded by Sith and Jedi and a thousand light years from her. Surely not something he could teach her. Surely not something she already possessed.

He surprised her, and nodded once. A deep gesture of acceptance. “I will ask again,” he promised. “Every day until you agree.”

She shook her head. “That won’t happen.”

He took a step toward her and she knew he meant to tempt her. He meant to coax her to acceptance like he had in so many of her dreams.

But instead he took one more step and said, “Have dinner with me. A hot meal would do you good.”

This she refused as well. “N-no! Take me back to Jakku! I need to be there. I’ve been gone too long already.”

His demeanor changed suddenly. He had been kind, of a sort. As kind as a kidnapper was capable, she supposed. Gentle and careful. But now he straightened.

“No. There is nothing left for you there, Rey.”

He walked to the door and did not turn back to her when he spoke. “You are free to go wherever you like. No one will stop you, and there is no place that is out of your bounds.”

He opened the door, but did not walk through. His voice was slow and purposeful when he spoke again, as if wanting to make certain that she did not misunderstand his meaning.

“My room is down the hall.”

 

Rey ate a portion from her bag for dinner. It tasted old though familiar, and she wondered if she had made the right choice in refusing his offer of a hot meal. But she swallowed this down and refused to consider his offers. For teaching, for actual food. The location of his room.

It did not occur to her that she would continue to dream about Winter-- _Kylo Ren_ \--even though she was in his possession. The dreams, she thought, had been a lure, but even here a mere few doors away from him, he visited her in sleep.

She was shy around him, now that she knew him in actuality. He was bold as ever, coming right to her and placing firm hands on her body. Bringing with him that cold and the sharp smell she thought of as snow. The last time she had dreamed of him, he’d used his mouth on her, his hands, and she had risen to his touch. He seemed to want to remind her of this, unraveling her layers of clothes and touching the places he’d touched so many times before.

She spun away from him, hid her face in her hands. It was one thing to give herself to pleasure and the attention of a lover that she knew only in dreams. But to know him in person, in actuality, made this too potent. Too real. She reached to pull her clothes right, to wrap herself up again.

He came up to her and she stiffened as he pressed into her back. But he laid gentle hands on her shoulders, warm lips to the small hollow of her temple.

“It’s still me, Rey. ‘Winter,’ isn’t it?”

She felt heat wash over her, shame at her naive name for him when she had nothing else to call him. But his gentle kisses at her hairline were persistent, and she relaxed into him. He didn’t try to unravel her clothes again, instead holding her and running feather-light touches of his lips over her cheeks and shoulders. Lifting her arm and traveling its length. Kissing each knuckle of her hand, the base of each nail, the tips of her fingers.

“You’re like Spring,” he murmured against her palm. “New and fresh and warm from the sun.”

She shuddered beneath his touch, innocent and gentle though it was. She wanted more, and that unsettled her. As if answering this unspoken want, his hands suddenly gripped her with punishing force. He shook her, and it took her some moments to realize that someone was trying to jostle her awake.

Her eyes flew open and she was greeted by a ghost. She opened her mouth to scream, but a hard hand fitted over her mouth. Not a ghost, no. A Stormtrooper. She was in a dimly lit hallway, half dressed and alone. Had she--

“I think you were sleepwalking, miss.”

His voice was kind though hardened by the mechanics of the mask. He released her, once he was sure she could stand on her own. She rubbed her arms where he had gripped her, the hard armor of his fingers leaving angry red marks on her skin.

“Who are you?”

“FN-2187,” he answered almost automatically.

That didn’t sound like a name, but she nodded. “I’m Rey.”

“I know. You shouldn’t be here, Rey.”

Just as he said this, a broken wail sounded through the hallway. It was coming from behind one of the closed doors. A sad, pain-filled moan. A sound like dying.

“What was that?” Rey asked, but FN-2187 was already motioning her in the opposite direction. His armor clad hand found hers to lead her down the hallway, and she shook herself out of his grasp. He held up his hands in a show of surrender and apology, and Rey followed where he led.

When they were before her door again, FN-2187 turned to her. “I’ll stand guard outside your door to make sure you don’t wander out again,” he promised.

“What was that sound, FN-2187?” Rey asked as he swiped her door open and tried to usher her through.

He shook his head, the dim hall lights reflecting off his helmet and dancing before her eyes. “Just another lost soul, Rey.”

It took her a very long time to find sleep again. When she did, Winter was there, waiting for her.

 

She showered when she woke and dressed in clothes that were strange to her. They fit well enough, perhaps too well, if she were honest, but she wasn’t used to the give and softness of the fabrics, or that she had the choice of so many different colors. Her hands stroked over a pretty green frock, but landed eventually on a matching black set. Simple, with long, slashed sleeves and fitted leggings, but the color. She wanted to see what black looked like on her skin.

When she left her room, she didn’t know what to expect. The lights weren’t as dim as when FN-2187 had led her back to her room the night before, and she looked carefully at this place, the Underground. The halls were clean, sterile almost, and small groups of soldiers, more Stormtroopers, passed on occasion. She wondered if FN-2187 was among them. Like Winter-- _no, Kylo Ren--_ promised, no one stopped her or questioned her.

She eventually came upon a training arena. Stormtroopers and others dressed in all black, masked and oddly reminiscent of Kylo Ren, sparred on mats using strange weapons she didn’t know the exact name for. Her fingers trailed over a rack of weapons, coming to rest on a sturdy staff, not unlike the rusted one sitting in her room.

She pulled it from the rack and tested its weight in her hands, its length. She twirled it once, twice, then brought it slashing down to the mat. She glanced over her shoulder; some of the black clad soldiers had stopped to look at her. They turned quickly away when she caught them out. She stood and spun the staff again, bringing it down with punishing force.

It met with something hard and solid halfway through her swing, jarring her and sending a shock of pain through her arm. Kylo Ren, masked and towering, held a staff of his own in his hands, holding off her blow, then pushing, deflecting it entirely. Rey spun away, shaking out her numbed arm, before gripping her hands back on her weapon. She settled her feet and aimed again, this time ready for an opponent.

He was much more powerful than she, and deflected blow after blow easily. Carelessly. Eventually, he swung out his staff and knocked her from her feet, the butt of this weapon poised over her neck. She gulped air and looked up into his mask. After another moment, he stepped back, holding out a hand to help her up. Warily she placed her hand in his. Her heart stuttered at his tight grip, but he released her quickly. He stepped behind her and kicked her feet further apart, forcing her into a much lower crouch. A sharp push to her shoulder had her refocusing her center of gravity, and he moved her right hand further down her staff.

“Again.”

He still outmatched her in strength, but closer to the ground like this, Rey had an advantage on his larger body. She was better able to evade him and caught him with blows more than once. Twice more he adjusted her stance, and she listened, following his instructions. They fought until she was slick with sweat and panting. She could hear the raggedness of his own breaths even through the modulator of his helm, and this reassured her.

When finally he bowed to her, signaling the end of their match, she noticed the small crowd that had gathered. They quickly dispersed, but she thought it must look odd, this strange girl sparring with a man who could only be of the highest ranks in--wherever this place was.

“Will you let me teach you, Rey?” he asked once his breathing had settled.

“No,” she answered quickly.

He nodded.

“Join me for dinner, then.”

She replaced her staff on the rack of weapons and turned back to him. Her stomach rumbled and she thought of the dry portions waiting for her back in her rooms. But she thought also of that strangled wail in the hallway the night before and of what the galaxy whispered this strangely kind man to be. It was obvious, by the actions of those around them in the training arena, that his kindness was limited.

“No,” she answered, and walked back to her rooms.

 

Her days continued much the same. She always found her way to the training arena, though sometimes she would attempt to get there earlier or later than the day before. Kylo Ren was always there, however, waiting for her. They fought hard, and she would often leave bruised or bleeding. She didn’t mind. She could feel herself getting stronger, each day learning something new and discovering a better way to use the strength of her body, even against an opponent as large as him.

At the end of their matches, he would always ask to teach her, and she would always refuse, though it was painfully obvious that he was her teacher at least in part. He would then offer dinner, and this proposal became increasingly difficult to reject.

Her supply of portions was running low. She wasn’t able to ration them as she had hoped. The daily exhaustion of her body on the training mats required more and more nutrients to sustain.

Then, at night, after a day spent with Kylo Ren, she would find herself again with Winter. Some nights he would spend hours cataloging every inch of her skin with careful, gloveless fingers, leaving her wet and aching and almost too ashamed to go to the arena to see the man in person. Other nights he would simply hold her, tracing over her body with light fingers and lighter lips, telling stories against her skin about the Force and the Rebels and the Empire. He would ask for her stories as he raked these gentle fingers through her hair, and she admitted that she had very few.

A day could only end with a tally mark on a wall and a hollow ache in her stomach so many times before it was no longer a story, but a promise.

On one such night, after telling her story of the merchant in the air conditioned ship who would have had Rey on her back even as a child, Rey tried to meet Winter’s lips with hers. Tired of feeling sad and sorry, wanting to draw comfort from soft lips and a clever tongue. But he dodged away.

A soft whisper of his voice in her head told her that he wouldn’t accept this as a dream. To kiss her would only do in the sweetest of realities. Awake and present and willing.

The next morning, when she went all the earlier to the arena, he met her with a strange object in his hand.

“No staffs today. Today, we fight with lightsabers.”

He handed her the cool, weighty hilt and she stared up at him.

“Lightsabers?” He’d told her about these in his nighttime stories, but she never truly believed they existed. Swords made of hot and burning and light seemed like the stuff of only dreams, of just fanciful stories and nothing else.

But he ignited his with a _whump_ and she could only stare. It didn’t look like he’d described. This was red and crackling and _angry_. His stories always told of soft, cool colors that cut through the air, deadly and beautiful. She wondered why he’d lied to her--

Dazzling blue light greeted her when she ignited her own saber. This, _this_ was what he had described. A powerful, steady hum, a solid bar of dangerous and lovely light that would slice through anything except its mate in weaponry. Wholly different from the spitting, crackling thing in his own grip.

He raised his weapon, and it made a queer noise as it sliced through the air. She raised hers as well, marveling at how it felt both heavy and weightless in her hand. Like it moved too quickly for what it was, propelled faster than any other weapon she knew.

When the blades met, there was less of that jarring shock that would rock through her bones when they would meet, staff to staff. It was still hard, combative, but it seemed something like magic. She was dazed by the bright lights, the buzzing hum of their paths to and away from each other. She was glad to bring her weapon down, regretful to draw it away. It was like dancing, this touching of light then drawing back. She felt graceful. It felt natural, more so than the hard, ordinary rust of her staff.

She caught his blade on a downward stroke, and their differing light mingled and sparked and mixed. She was washed in lilac light and looked up into--his mask. She wished, suddenly and for reasons she didn’t quite understand, that she could see his snow-pale face washed in the mixed light of their sabers. He was beautiful, her passionate captor, and she imagined his face lit in lilac, closed her eyes and hummed in content at the picture.

He threw his weight into his deflection of her blade and she fell, off balance. Her weapon extinguished in her hand as she fell, and she looked up at him from the floor. Mighty and broad in his black cloak, with a saber that looked more fire than light--primal and livid and consuming. He moved the blade only inches from her neck, so hot she could feel the tightening of skin and smell the burning of the wisps of her hair that drifted into the saber’s path.

“Stay focused.” He moved the blade a fraction closer, just on the edge of pain. “Daydreams have no place in battle.”

He extinguished his saber and helped her from the floor, though she was less willing to take his hand than before. She felt as if he’d seen what she was imagining, and that did not sit well with her in the slightest.

 

She was two days without food when she collapsed with a lit lightsaber in her hand. He yanked it from beneath her before she could fall upon it. He dragged her from the training arena and into her room. He quickly found her bag and rifled through it.

It was empty, of course. He shook it, turning it inside out, but found nothing.

“How long since you’ve eaten, Rey?” he asked, but she was having trouble focusing. She squinted her eyes but he was coming in and out of focus. He dropped the bag and pulled her to the floor before she could fall. A breeze blew his hood back, though they were in her room, not out of doors. And yet--his cloak was less fabric and more fur, black, heavy pelts that she had only seen in dreams before.

“Winter?” she asked, and he nodded, pulling his helmet from his head and setting it aside.

“Yes, Spring. When did you last eat?”

She shook her head, not really remembering. Her hair was loose now, a gauzy veil obscuring her vision as she looked to him, tried to make sense of him. “I--I don’t know.”

His brow creased and he pulled something from his cloak, right at his chest.

His own heart. Violent red in his black leather fist. She gasped as he broke it in half in front of her, the chambers filled with so much blood that it dripped off his hands and onto--her white linen dress. He pushed the veil aside, lifted a piece of his heart to her lips, spreading the blood sticky but oddly cool on her lips. She looked at him, a crown of berries and evergreen sprigs framing his temples.

“Eat this, Spring. Please eat this.”

She licked her lips out of instinct more than anything else and found sweet rather than salt. Tangy and bright. He lifted the piece of his heart to her lips again, and she opened her mouth, felt the sticky sweet pips of him fall between her lips. She chewed, feeling them burst with a flavor she didn’t think was blood, but didn’t know what else it could be. It was astringent against her tongue, made her teeth hurt, but she opened for another bite. More pips, as if he could plant himself inside her.

He brought his heart to her hand as snow started to fall from her ceiling, drifting down through a sparse canopy of trees. His heart was leathery and cool and had more chambers, more seeds than she could count. But it weighed about what she thought a heart should. It was snowing harder, and she should be cold in nothing but a linen pleated slip, but she wasn’t. She lifted his heart right to her lips to eat, and the glittering brass bangles at her wrists clinked softly together. He gathered her to him, holding her in his arms as she ate. Bright red ran down her chin and her arms and he lifted her, his full mouth trailing to lick the sweet, sticky blood from her arms. He’d never touched her like this, not when they weren’t dreaming, but she found she didn’t much care the more of his heart she consumed.

He lapped at the crease of her elbow, breath hot against her, melting what snow fell on the fine hairs of her arm.

“Have you never had fruit before?” he asked. His eyes were closed as if savoring the flavor of his blood on her skin, speaking against the faint flutter of pulse at her wrist.

“Fruit?” She’d eaten all of this half, the leather shell of it creamy white and mottled pink on the inside, empty of every seed. He handed her the other half, warm from his hand.

“Pomegranate,” he said as she took another dribbling, explosive bite. He sucked at her wrist where the crimson dripped. “It’s not a common fruit in the first place, but I doubt you ever knew it on Jakku.”

She was coming back to herself. No snow, no cloak made of heavy, black pelts, no pleated linen dress. The hammered brass rings on her fingers and bangles on her wrists were gone.

And she wasn’t holding his heart, but a strange, delightful fruit. Pomegranate.

She hadn’t been so hungry as to disintegrate into delusions; she’d gone longer without food in the desert. She looked down at the man holding her clumsily in his lap, blood red juice staining the corner of his mouth. She ducked to lick the juice away and he shuddered beneath her.

Had he brought the dream to coax her to eat? Was this the Force he told her about, able to pull at the very threads of her mind and change the weft of the fabric of her reality?

Did she really have that within her?

“Rey--”

“I’m hungry, Ren. May I join you for dinner?”

 

He called for food right there on her floor, a quick tapping on a holopad that meant he didn’t have to stand, didn’t have to let her out of his grip. He fed her more fruit and warm bread, something sweet called _honey_ and hot, spicy wine that made her eyes heavy.

He laid her in the bed and she pulled him in after her. Wrapped herself, half-drunk, in his cloak with him and slept heavy on his chest. She didn’t dream of Winter because she was already in his arms. Instead she dreamt of Spring and trees heavy-laden with fruit that tasted hot like the sun and sweet like heart’s blood.

 

Rey woke up a few hours later with Kylo Ren beneath her. She was still tangled comfortably in his heavy cloak, asleep on his back as he slept on his stomach under her. She smiled, something she hardly remembered how to do, as she thought of how ridiculous this was: asleep on the back of Kylo Ren, of Winter, the King of a place called The Underground.

A place for lost souls. Though she felt much less adrift than she had before.

She shuffled off of him, feeling deliciously full and warm and content. She moved aside his thick curtain of hair to look at his sleeping face, and that foreign smile tugged at her lips again. He looked wholly unguarded, lips and brow slack in sleep. There were dark freckles scattered across his face and she bent to kiss one high on his cheek.

He stirred beneath her lips and startled away from her, eyes darting about the room and hand reaching for his weapon. It had come unattached from his belt and lay near the edge of the bed. She grabbed it and handed it to him.

His head canted at this gesture, sleepy eyes sweeping over her face. He took the hilt of his saber from her fingers and set it up and away on the bed.

Then he pulled her beneath him and kissed her. It was a drowsy kiss, slow and without agenda. Her first kiss. Rey opened to it, arching just so beneath him as he settled more of his warm, comforting weight on her. She threaded her fingers up and into his hair, then traveled down. She pulled at the cowl wrapped around him, at his cloak and tunic. He parted from her to assist, black fabric falling heavily from his fingers to the floor as he shed more and more of his layers.

Bared to the chest, she unlatched his arm guards, wanting more skin. More warm skin the color of stone bleached by the sun. He pulled her tunic from her as well. Her leggings and underthings. She was quivering, excited and frightened the more they shed and the more she was able to see, able to touch. He stroked large, calloused hands over her trembling body, calming her as she pulled more of his clothes from him.

She set curious lips to a scar tracing over his chest. Discovered how the texture of him differed here with her mouth and then her fingers. He shivered, gooseflesh tightening his skin. He pressed into her, skin against so much skin. Naked and warm and moving so very slow. His thickly muscled thigh pushed between hers and she gasped at the sudden pressure against her core. She realized how wet she’d become when she could feel it in contrast with his skin and she released a shaky sigh.

But he went no further. Just pressed into her, heavy and encompassing as he kissed lazy trails up her neck.

She was glad for this, glad for his overwhelming presence, but also for his stillness. Somehow knowing this was exactly the amount of intimacy her frightened body needed, and giving her just that.

“How did you--” she began, her voice so small against his neck. “Last night, when I held your… Well, what I thought was your heart in my hand. How did you do that? Was that the Force, making me see you like I do in my dreams?”

He shifted, pressing more firmly against her slick flesh, and she gasped again. “It was the Force, Spring.” His name for her tightened something in her chest. A hard squeeze just beneath her sternum. “It was the Force, but it wasn’t me.”

He moved again, and this time she moaned and moved against him, her body rolling in a way that seemed far too natural and completely foreign at the same time.

“I can show you,” he said. “I can teach you how to control this thing inside of you. It’s beautiful, Spring, isn’t it? The Force?”

This time she moved first, trying to gain that little shock of pleasure again. He moved one of his hands to her hip, then further, between them, dipping down and in. She made a sound that was something like breathing and something like laughing as he stroked sure fingers over her. He knew exactly where to touch her, precisely where her need was focused and _nudged._ It washed over her like warm water and she dug her fingers into his back.

This, she recognized. This, she remembered from dreams. But the reality, the actual press of his steady fingers over her skin, was overwhelming. She gasped and shuddered beneath him, and he drove her quickly to that precipice. Clutched her to him as she broke apart in his hands.

“You looked beautiful in that white dress, Spring.” His voice was low and gravelly, as if the pleasure she was drinking in was affecting them both. “The flowers...and the veil. I--I liked it very much.”

She thought again of the night before, as tremors coursed over her body and his slick fingers slowed against her. She thought of the pine laurels in his hair and the falling snow and his feeding his heart to her, bite after sharp-sweet bite.

She’d done that, not him. Brought them into a dream and kept them there with a power she didn’t even grasp. What could she do if he were to teach her? What could she learn from him if she gave him half a chance?

“Teach me, Winter,” she muttered. She spoke into his neck, too afraid to look at his face as she requested that which he had been offering for weeks and weeks.

He moved off of her and she felt as if she might float away without his bulk anchoring her to her bed. He attempted to pull her clothes back onto her body in fumbling, awkward tugs before finally giving up and wrapping her gently in his cloak.

“Get dressed, Rey. I have something to show you.”

She didn’t want to take his cloak from her body, so she didn’t. She dressed quickly, more black pieces that complemented the man dressing behind her. Then she pulled the cloak onto her shoulders, wrapping herself in the smell of him. It dragged ridiculously on the floor, but it was heavy, like him, and she felt like it might help her keep her footing in this new world where she ate fruit and took lessons from the ruler of lost souls.

When she turned back, his mouth was tight at the sight of her swathed in his cloak. He reached for her, and she half expected him to take it back from her. But he instead adjusted it on her shoulders, tugging it tighter about her.

He placed his helm back on his head and she immediately missed his eyes. But she knew that he meant to take her somewhere, if he’d felt the need to don it again. He always took the mask off when they were alone together, but she had a feeling that she was one of the few, perhaps only, people in the Underground that had seen the face of Kylo Ren.

He led her from her room and strode down the hallway, turned, turned again. They seemed to be going _down_ as they went through doorway after doorway, long hall after slightly downward sloping long hall. She thought she would never find wherever this place was again on her own, but as he ushered her through the final doorway, she knew that wasn’t going to be true.

She would remember how to come back here.

It was a garden, she supposed, though it seemed long dead. It was lit by a diffused light for which she couldn’t quite determine a source. The paths were once paved with carefully laid stones, though years of passing feet had broken these down into little more than garbled rocks and grit. The different flowerbeds held withered and dusty plants, only vaguely green through the grime. Some stubborn blooms still held to stems, though long bleached of natural color and now a choked brown. It was sad and oddly quiet in this dead garden, and Rey felt tears on her face at the tragedy of so much wasted life.

She turned back to Kylo Ren with his mask tucked beneath an arm, a question on her lips, but it withered like the flowers around her at the sight of his face. He was looking at her like he _saw_ her. Like her thoughts hung as a mist around her and all he had to do was breathe them in. Like her sadness was his sadness and she would never have to carry it alone again.

He held a hand out to her and she went to him. Placed her hand in the soft leather grip. She was losing the brown tinge to her skin, being so long from the the sun. She was paling to match the man before her. Like she was a path being slowly covered with snow.

“There’s not one particular purpose for the Force, Rey--Spring.” He pulled her down a path lined with jagged bushes whose rotted blooms might have once been roses. Rey had never seen roses in real life, only in faded colors on staticky holos. She regretted that this was her first sight of them.

“The Force can help you fight, the Force can help you conquer, the Force can do something so inconsequential as help you sleep.” He stopped before a particularly ragged bush, its long, thorny arms reaching brown and brittle feet above even his head. “The Force can help you grasp the things you want.”

Rey felt her face heat at this. She remembered her vision from the night. How Winter had handed her his heart and she ate it, bite after bite. He watched her like he knew these were her thoughts. “Last night,” he said, voice low. “You were frightened, and the Force helped you to best that fear. Showed you what you wanted.”

_His heart, tangy and sweet._

“What do you want now?”

Rey broke from his gaze to look at the withered garden around her.

“I want--”

He crouched before the wizened rose bush, took her hand and laid it against the thick shoots at its base.

“I want--”

He tugged off his gloves with fingers and teeth then wrapped his hands around hers on the long dead shrub.

“I want _green._ ”

She felt a pulse, a pulse she recognized, knew so intimately that she felt ridiculous for thinking this new. What flowed from her palms was the satisfaction at pulling a complete compressor from the underside of a console. It was the surge of energy that propelled her _up up up_ the insides of a colossal starship, even though she hadn’t eaten a full portion in days. It was the tug like magnets of her blue saber blade on Kylo Ren’s sparking red as they sparred in a room full of countless wretched souls while seeming like the only two at the same time.

It was pine laurels weaved through dark hair and snow falling from her ceiling.

It was the flood of green that bled through shrivelled leaves, plumping them back to quenched, veiny life. The soft velvet that unfurled petals from the brittle of brown to the vitality of vermillion.

She watched as her want for green poured life into this great though frangible plant. Leaves reached like fingers and blushing blooms opened like a fist unclenched. Winter took her hands from the plant’s base and guided her to stand.

“That’s it,” he whispered and she watched as the green, _the Force,_ breathed into the next rose bush, then the next. “Keep going.” He moved behind her, tracing fingers down her arms to cup the backs of her hands. As if her were trying to feel the Force flowing from her and into the slowly blooming garden around her.

A breeze blew, and the diffused light altered to unfiltered sunlight, warm and direct. Her white dress fluttered around her ankles, and she looked down to see wispy tendrils of vines whispering over her bare feet and tickling her toes. Winter stepped closer into her and laid his lips along her temple, kissing as gently as the slowly opening buds on the nearby tree.

Flowers she didn’t know the name of, and colors she had never imagined, exploded from fresh green buds. An entire season of bloom was happening right in front of her, a Spring she had never known. The Force, showing her what she wanted, and helping her to achieve it. She didn’t feel tired or drained, but rather invigored. The more the garden burst with life, the stronger she felt. It was turning wild and overgrown, but so, so beautiful. Vines climbed the walls and heavy fruit fell from the trees. She couldn’t have enough green, couldn’t watch a flower stretch and bloom enough times. Each reaching petal was a gift.

Something nudged her foot. She looked down to see a pomegranate, fallen from the tree that had grown twice its size since she had last looked to it. She knelt and picked it up, disengaging from Winter’s arms for only a moment, before turning back to him. She broke the fruit in half, blood-red juice flowing down her palms and wrists. She dug into the chambers of it, bursting arils with too-eager fingers, and brought the pips to his lips. He ate them gladly, sucked the juice from her skin and nibbled at her with pink tinged teeth. The juice dripped onto his chin, like fresh-shed blood on snow, and she cleaned this from him with a precise swipe of her tongue.

He cupped the back of her hand again, bringing the fruit to his mouth, and took an exacting bite, watching her as he did so. When he lowered it, when he kissed her, his lips tasted like a color, like bright and sharp and red. She let the fruit fall from her fingers and felt the vines wrap about her ankles, drawing her closer to him. She wrapped her arms around him and thought she wouldn’t mind if she were consumed entirely by this gift of a garden, so long as he was there beside her.

 

That night, tucked away in Winter's spacious bed, her dreams were different.

The first thing she noticed was the hard bite of pomegranate at the back of her tongue. The next, that Winter was nowhere in sight.

She was in an apartment she didn’t recognize. The lights were dimmed and the space was eerily quiet. There was a hallway to her left that ended in at a slightly ajar door. Rey crept quietly closer, as if afraid to disturb the overbearing silence of the space. Small snuffling sounds reached her ears as she neared the door, and as she pushed it the rest of the way open, she saw him.

A little boy who couldn’t be more than nine years old. His back was facing her and his little spine was hunched. He faced a softly pulsing night light, as if trying to pretend away the dark of the rest of the room. He was crying, she realized, and muttering. He had dark hair and ears that stuck absurdly from his head. Rey felt a jolt of recognition, though she didn’t know from where. She moved closer.

His words were hushed and she realized that he was talking _to_ someone. Perhaps a holo in his lap?--

She was right up on him and saw that he was alone. No holo, no storybooks laid out on the floor. He scratched over the back of his hand with jagged, bitten fingernails and rocked slightly back and forth. His hand was red from the repeated tick, little scratches that had begun to bleed and smear.

“Mommy said she’d be home early tonight. Da’s gone, of course. Da’s gone, of course. Da’s gone, of course…” His voice was quiet and hard. Repeating the words over and over, like a penance. Rey reached a shaking hand out to him, wanting to comfort this little boy even as she was afraid to guess his name.

“I know you’re there--” he said, and Rey recoiled. The boy didn’t turn around, just huddled closer to the little light near the bottom of the wall. Cupped his small hands around it as if it gave off warmth. One hand scratched and crisscrossed with thin tracks of blood, the other red under the fingernails. “I know you’re there for me always. You’re there. You’re _here._ Da’s gone, of course. Mommy said… But you’re here.” He touched the light, smearing blood on its pulsing face. “Thank you for keeping me company. Da’s gone, of course…”

Rey stumbled away, knocking hard into a little table scattered with model X-wings. The miniature ships tumbled to the floor and the boy whirled around to face her. She got one startling look into a face she knew too well, though aged by sadness that must have started _here_. He shot out a hand and knocked her from her feet with a powerful pulse of the Force.

She hit her head hard against the floor and she looked up into a much different man’s face she didn’t know. She opened her mouth to scream before he place an armored hand over it. A gesture she recognized.

“FN-2187?” she asked through his fingers pressed hard to her lips. He nodded and slowly removed his hand.

She sat up, finding herself again in a deserted hallway of the Underground. She looked again to the man--no, _boy_ \--sitting next to her. His face was kind but drawn. He had a full mouth that looked made for smiling, and instead, it was set in a hard line. His dark eyes were trained on her.

“Are you alright, Rey?”

She nodded, not sure why he had his helmet off. She was oddly glad for it, however; his voice was nice, steady and warm, even through his concern.

“Rey?”

“I--I’m fine. I guess I was sleepw--”

An anguished scream cut her words short and FN-2187 tossed a worried glance over his shoulder. He reached out and took Rey’s hand, pulling her from the floor. “Come on. We should--”

Rey yanked her hand from his grasp and rushed toward the scream.

“Rey!” he hissed after her, but she ignored him, determined to find out what this was all about. Just as she made it to the door, FN-2187 grabbed her around the middle and pulled her into an alcove. His hand was over her mouth again as she was about to protest and she heard the door open. She struggled in the ‘trooper’s arms, but stilled as she saw Winter--no, _Kylo Ren--_ emerge from the room and hurry past where they were huddled. After another long moment, FN-2187 released her.

“FN-tw--”

“It’s ‘Finn,’ actually,” he corrected in a quiet whisper behind her. She turned.

“Finn?”

He nodded. She could see the flutter of his jaw bones beneath his skin. His face so set and so serious.

“Come with me.”

He tried reaching for her hand again, but she kept it from him and followed him from the alcove. To her surprise, he led her into the room Ren had just exited. There was what she supposed was a chair in the middle of the space, though it looked more like a weapon than anything. A sandy-haired young man was strapped to it, his watery blue eyes wide and his freckled skin covered in a thin sheen of sweat. FN-2-- _Finn_ , waved a hand in front of the man’s eyes, but he didn’t respond. His lips were moving, muttering something too quiet to hear.

Rey stepped closer, revulsion beginning to roll over her in waves. The man, so young she thought he could have been a boy if not for the pain in his eyes, did not react to her leaning in closer.

“I’m sorry.” The man’s voice was the whisper of a throat screamed raw. “I’m sorry. Please General, I’m sorry.” His eyes shot up then, meeting Rey’s in sudden lucidity.

Rey felt a tug, a pull, and felt suddenly as if this man _saw_ her. Or, more absurdly, as if she could see _into_ him.

Finn’s hands wrapped firmly around her arms and jerked her back as the incensed prisoner lunged at her face, his teeth clacking in a savage bite. Finn released her immediately, and Rey stalked from the room. Finn followed quietly after her as she walked without purpose down one hallway, then the next.

She couldn’t make sense of the scene she had just witnessed. She knew of the First Order, and even more distantly of the Knights of Ren, from whispers of passing merchants and smugglers on Jakku. But only snips and the last half of thoughts. Violence. Conquest. Hostile takeover.

 _But she’d heard these words before_ , she thought as her feet traveled a path down through the dimly lit Underground that might not be as directionless as she had first considered. She grew up with these words. They flavored every walk to Niima Outpost. They left streaks of blood on her staff as she beat away competition from her hauls. She was no stranger to violence. To the want of control.

When her wandering feet led her and Finn to the now dimly lit garden, she found that she wasn’t much surprised. Finn looked around in utter awe.

“What is this place?” he asked as he pulled his armored glove from his hand and reached to touch a blood-red bloom.

Rey watched his fingers stroke the fragile blossom, pull a crimson petal between his fingers and lift it to his nose to sniff. She thought of how she’d pulled Winter--he was still Winter then--down into the rippling brambles with her, on top of her. How he’d kissed her and touched her until she was shaking beneath him. How she’d opened to him, ready and so warm.

And how he had stopped, pulled himself from her. Red petals, like the one in Finn’s fingers, were scattered through his inky hair. He had speared frustrated fingers through his hair and scattered her half bared body with the weightless touches of red velvet. Then he had taken her to his bed. Held her close. Given her more of his body, but not all. Never all.

“ _You wouldn’t want me if you knew, Spring. You’d leave me if you knew.”_

“My garden, I suppose,” she answered Finn. She half expected the blooms to wilt, the leaves to wither with her slow revelations.

“You did this?” he asked. “How?”

She reached for his hand, the bare one, and led him to the far reaches of the garden, where there still stood bushes and trees less affected by her blooming pulse. She wrapped fingers around a reaching arm of something that used to be alive, and channeled her want of green into it, the Force. Life bled into it, unfurling white blossoms with petals like crinkled paper. It felt less wonderful now, she thought, knowing the Force could bleed life _from_ things, as well.

When she looked to Finn, she saw the smile that his face was meant to nurture. “So it’s true then? All of it?”

Rey wasn’t sure what he meant, but she nodded her head. _You’d leave me if you knew._

“All of it.”

Finn squeezed the hand he still held.

“Rey. What do you know about the Resistance?”

 

Rey walked back to Winter’s rooms alone some time later. The boy in the chair, he’d been from the Resistance. And Finn. Finn had joined, and was doing his part as a double agent. She supposed she should be flattered that he trusted her enough to tell her, considering where she slept. But she found she didn’t have much room for flattered or grateful.

All she could think of was the young man from the Resistance’s blank eyes and his echoing of the tortured little boy’s words:

“Da’s gone, of course.”

She whispered this into the dark outside of Winter’s rooms before swiping the door open. She wondered what the words meant. Wondered what would drive a young Winter to scratch himself raw, what mother could stand to leave him alone so late into the night. What father could stand to leave him altogether.

When she opened the door, Winter wasn’t in the bed. She wondered if he hadn’t made it back yet, or if he had found her gone and had left to look for her. Both were equally upsetting notions, so she entertained neither. She instead turned from the cool dark rooms and went back in the direction of the Resistance prisoner strapped to the chair.

The door was still open when she came upon the room again, the boy still where she had left him. He seemed more lucid now, his mutterings fallen silent and his hard eyes instead following her around the room. She came up to him, reached out a hand, knuckles first, as if trying to temper a wild dog. When he did not snap at her, only watched with angry eyes, she touched his cheek and spoke.

“What’s your name?”

He didn’t answer though this didn’t much surprise her.

“I’m Rey,” she offered, and something flickered across his eyes.

He backed away from her, as much as the hard chair would allow and bared his teeth. “He talked about you.”

“Who did?” she asked, though she knew.

“The Jedi Killer.”

There was blood in the boy’s mouth, though he seemed to be untouched. Rey shuddered to think how hard he had bitten his tongue to keep from talking.

“The Jedi Killer?”

He nodded. “Kylo Ren.”

Rey tried to keep a straight face, though she didn’t know how well she was holding it. “What did he say?”

“That I had _Rey_ to thank for mercy. Thank the queen of the Underground, Rey, _Spring,_ that I lived through this.”

She felt tears in her eyes, a hard clutch just behind her tongue that made breathing a difficult thing. Her voice was small through the pain in her throat. “He did this to you. Kylo Ren.”

The young man nodded. “He did. Are you here to finish the job?”

She pinched her lips tight, remembering the garden and how she had flowed life into the very roots of it. And now this scared young thing expected her to snuff his using only her--

“How did he do this to you? What did he do to you?”

His eyes widened. “Don’t you know?”

She shook her head, a frantic motion that sent the tears streaking down her cheeks.

“He looked inside, Spring. He peeled back my wrappings and he looked inside.”

She tasted bile and suddenly felt a tug behind the bridge of her nose. As if, now that she had the name for it, and the means, that she could just as easily look. And though it hurt, though she couldn’t breathe and wanted nothing but to back away, she did.

She looked.

_Tal._

His name came to her first. The thing he kept at the front of his mind, like a talisman, like a shield.

_I am Tal, son of Sora and Orn. We live on--_

She backed away, not wanting this, not wanting to look inside anymore. But it was hard to find her way out. She was lost in the twist and turns and only seemed to be digging deeper. She saw a military base on a far, green planet. Saw shaking hands patching a torn and ragged pilot’s suit, saw a mother’s tear streaked face. _Sora._

She saw Finn! Arms wrapped around a handsome man whose eyes made others want to be seen. Finn hurriedly giving him coordinates to a place with a name Tal didn’t quite catch. This man, _Poe Dameron_ , directing pilots in a mission towards a smoldering planet where no base could be seen.

 _Finn was wrong._ Tal’s thoughts in her ear. _There’s nothing here._

Then Poe’s shout to turn about. They’d been spotted too soon. They couldn’t make it into the Underground.

_The Underground. The base is beneath the surface._

And Tal, breaking formation and paying dearly for it. Waking in a chair more vice than virtue and screaming as Kylo Ren looked and looked and looked.

It hurt. It hurt so much. And Tal was slipping away. Draining, not filling. More and more empty the more Kylo Ren drank.

Strong hands pulled her away and she shrieked into the ripping pain of it. Her voice was matched by Tal’s, an anguished grunt that she recognized from its earlier echoes in the hall.

“Rey, you shouldn’t--”

She whirled on him, on the man she had called Winter. Though he was masked now, and so much larger than he seemed hours ago. Kylo Ren. Jedi Killer.

“What have you done?” she demanded. She didn’t know where to look with his mask on. She couldn’t see his eyes or the careful curl of his lips or the slight fold to his cheeks when he found pleasure in her. This was just glass and metal and the endless black of space. No man at all.

“Spring--”

“Don’t.”

She reached to the chair and somehow knew its secret. She knew how to disengage Tal from it.

“I’m leaving,” she said. She gathered Tal to her. Tall and gangly, but light enough to support. “I’m taking Tal home. You won’t stop me, will you, Kylo Ren?”

She wished she could see his face. Wished she were looking into the face of some _one_ , instead of some _thing_. But that wasn’t a flower that bloomed in this garden. Wishes made due in the shade, withering and wasting while _want_ and _willing_ thrived in the sun.

She hiked Tal further up her side, supporting almost his full weight.

“You wouldn’t deny your queen, would you, Winter?”

Had he a face, it might have scowled. But all she knew was his step back and his outstretched hand, indicating the open door. His voice like metal.

“Go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please take a moment and let me know what you thought! I appreciate and adore any and all feedback! Thanks!


	3. Part III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I totally forgot that the epilogue was a separate part from part III, so one more (sexy) installment coming. Heh.

**Part III**

**Rey’s first time flying a ship was** everything and nothing like she expected. She tried to act like she knew what she was doing as she boarded the nearby shuttle, a delirious and stumbling man in her grip. Stormtroopers made to stop her, but others held them back. Mechanical voices spoke in hushed tones that this one was Lord Ren’s and she was not to be questioned. She all but poured Tal into the copilot’s seat and took a few moments to try to center herself before bringing the ship to life.

She turned to Tal and he looked back at her with steady if weary eyes. “You know how to get to your base?” she asked.

He nodded.

“You know how to get to your base if I take the long way around? Make them--” she gestured to the docking bay around them, “--less likely to follow.”

“I know the coordinates, Spring,” he answered dryly.

She stood and pressed him brutally into his seat, watching his wincing face. “My name is Rey. Never call me anything else.”

He nodded and she released him.

“Right, then. We’re going to Jakku first.”

 

* * *

 

The decrepit AT-AT was much the same as she had left it. She had no use for any of the things she kept in it, but she took what few there were regardless. Her handmade doll. The faded pilot’s helmet. The sharp implement she used to scratch tallies on a rusted wall.

She didn’t want whoever left her here to think she was still on Jakku. _They’re never coming back. There’s nothing left for you there._ But she removed any trace of _Rey_ just in case. At the last moment, she turned back to her tallied wall and lifted her implement a final time to the porous surface.

As her ship lifted off to take them both to Tal’s base, sand blasted back on the wall through the left-open door of Rey’s old home, making the craggy words just that much harder to read through the dust.

_I stopped wishing._

 

* * *

 

The planet was called D’Qar and it was green. It paled in comparison to her abandoned garden, but there was life here. There was sun and warm and wet in the air. It felt settled into itself, not spring’s transition. This was summer. This was the long hot she’d read about.

She exited the shuttle with her hands raised and Tal’s name on her lips. The blasters aimed at her didn’t lower, but they didn’t fire either. She stepped aside, letting Tal tell the truth they wouldn’t believe from her. She let them cuff her and let them question her endlessly. She half expected them to strap her to a chair and pry her story from her piece by piece, because _wasn’t that what was done?_

But they spoke to her instead. Perhaps out of kindness, or perhaps because these were not like the others. Kylo Ren and Rey were the same. They had the Force and could look where they wanted.

The Resistance had to ask permission. Or, at least, they kept their cards more guarded than the First Order.

She talked to many people, but the one who had her straightening her spine and tacking “ma’am” onto her answers was the one they called General Organa.

_Leia,_ she corrected when they were alone again.

“Tell me again how you came to us, Rey.”

The woman’s voice was steady and vibrated in the hollows of Rey’s chest and sinuses. She reminded her of Winter, strangely. That measured voice and those steady eyes.

“I was captured by...the First Order.”

Rey felt a nudge and her breath caught. A nudge behind the bridge of her nose, between her eyes. In her mind.

“Try again; the truth this time.”

This stopped Rey short. She looked hard at the woman across the table, replaying those words that could have just as easily fallen from some other person’s mouth. Those eyes again. And that slight nudge--

“I’m his mother,” Leia said, and Rey couldn’t hold back the incredulous look that twisted her face. She felt that slight push again, and this time leaned into it.

She saw again the quiet, empty apartment, though washed in the soft light of dawn. Watched a hand that wasn’t her own swipe open the door at the end of the hall. There was a sad little streak of blood on the dimming night light, and a small boy curled on top of the covers of his bed. He sucked his fist, the scratched one, and little pricks of blood stood out on too-white skin and on puckered, full lips.

She felt that sadness of a mother absent. That helplessness of watching a child wander where another could not follow.

She felt the resignation of a decision long avoided and Rey felt, as acutely as if it were her own, the pain of missing this little boy-- _my Ben--_ so much already.

Rey pulled out and away from Leia, her fingers pressing into the hollows of her temples. They both gasped as Rey came back to herself, and the General touched her own forehead.

“You don’t really know what you’re doing there, do you?” she asked.

Rey could only shake her head. She didn’t like this feeling of possessing new memories that weren’t her own. It seemed like a violation of the last sacred place within a person, and yet she felt compelled to look _so often_ now.

“I know someone who could teach you, though you’d have to help me find him first.”

At Rey’s puzzled face, Leia waved her hand as if dismissing the thought for later. She settled into her chair and nodded deeply toward Rey.

“Now, tell me how you came to be among the First Order.”

 

* * *

 

Rey had expected life in the summer to be...more. She wasn’t trusted to do much else but answer questions when new ones were thought up, though Rey didn’t think she blamed these haggard rebels. Everyday fewer and fewer ships returned to the base, and those that did were often near complete collapse when they all but crash landed back on tarmac. Rey noticed the sideways glances she got from those around her and she heard, though she really wished she didn’t, what they thought of her.

Rey filled her days doing the only thing the Resistance trusted her with: repairs. She would crawl under the dilapidated fighter ships and try to draw their worth from them, like so much salvage. She was good with working with what was on hand, and eventually was allowed to work with less and less supervision. Her latest project was to try to adapt the superior craftsmanship of the shuttle she had taken from the First Order to the ships of the Resistance.

It was a slow process.

For meals she would join Finn and his Poe at the very end of a table and endure the looks from others. These two didn’t seem to mind sitting on their own because of her, and she was glad for it. She didn’t have much to contribute, but she liked to listen to them talk. Finn seemed to not be able to say enough, as if his whole life had been spent _not saying so_ and now that he had someone to take in every single one of his words, every thought that he could form out loud, it was like he had the whole world to share with Poe.

And Poe listened. Poe wanted to hear more. _Every ounce of your day, please_ , and then some.

It was an absolute comfort to Rey when she had very little.

Alone in her tiny room, in her narrow bed, she wondered if she made the right choice. She hadn’t slept much since she ran from the Underground. In sleep there were dreams, and in dreams, there was _him_. This wasn’t the man she left, however. This wasn’t Winter. This was Kylo Ren, angry and vengeful ruler of those who were as good as dead. He had no time for the cataloging of her flesh with his lips, for kind stories about the history of the magic inside of them. All she saw was burning villages and ships that fell from the sky in angry bursts. A cold chain wrapped around a black gloved fist, holding back a snarling dog with three ferocious heads. Planets annihilated by weapons that could only be wielded by a god.

Sometimes, in the hours close to morning, he was another man altogether. Ben Solo, who grew frustrated when his mind didn’t take to meditation. Ben Solo, who pulled out his hair when the voices wouldn’t let him sleep at night. Ben Solo who missed his mother and only ever wanted his father to smile, just smile, when he saw him.

Ben Solo who beat his hands bloody against the cage that would become Kylo Ren.

 

* * *

 

Rey hadn’t told Leia the entirety of her time under the tutelage of Kylo Ren. In part because she was his _mother_ , but in part because she half expected Leia to simply take it from her mind. She had the Force. She could.

But she didn’t. She never did. No matter how often she requested confirmation or collaboration on new intel they received, the steady woman never pried farther than what Rey provided. So long as she didn’t attempt to lie.

She expected this time to be no different as she sat across from the General in her tidy office. But there was a hardness around her eyes that was foreign to her face when she called Rey to her. This was the face she wore when she received bad news. When she was told the casualty count from the latest mission. Rey instantly felt that slight prod between her eyes, and knew that this was not to be like their other meetings.

She sat in silence as Leia regarded her, tried to ignore that nudging feeling at the front of her mind. The General was silent for one more long moment, before she spoke.

“What’s your favorite fruit, Rey?”

Rey’s mind startled around this completely unexpected question, and she could help but sputter.

“I-I’m sorry?”

“I spoke clearly enough. Your favorite fruit.”

Again, her son’s voice from her lips, though, she supposed, it had always been his mother’s voice from his. “P-Pomegranate, I suppose.”

Leia’s face didn’t change, but Rey felt a slight increase of pressure within her mind before the woman retreated completely.

“That’s what I thought.”

Rey shook her head, looking around the small office for an indication of what any of this was supposed to mean. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, ma’am.”

Leia stood and braced her hands on the back of her chair. She watched Rey for a moment longer, then sat back down again. This was the most undone Rey had ever seen her, and she was wholly unnerved by it.

“Rey. I need you to tell me about your relationship with my so--with Kylo Ren. I need the whole truth from you, and I need it now.”

Rey felt her skin burn with shame as the images she most did not want to reveal to anyone, let alone the mother of her past-lover, surfaced in her mind. Leia tapped two fingers on the desk before her and Rey could see how thin her patience had become.

“Do you love my son, Rey? Or for the Maker’s sake, does he at least love you?”

Worse than detailing the intimacies their bodies had shared, this bold question flayed her to the bone. It was a question she had not asked herself, and for this exact reason. She felt suddenly adrift, apart from the person she wanted most and yet shouldn’t. Not when he could do such damage. Not when he could inflict such harm.

But she did. She knew that there was good in him like a sprout taking root. The man she called Winter was the boy Leia called Ben Solo and Rey loved him. She loved him.

“I don’t see how that matters,” she said instead.

She expected anger from Leia, but received none. _Perhaps the anger came from his absent father._ Instead she got a slow spreading smile--a thing rarely seen but instantly recognized.

“How long were you with Ben?” Leia asked, her voice decidedly lighter and more kind.

Rey shrugged. “About six months, I suppose.”

Leia nodded and laced her fingers before her. “I’d say it was for about six months that we felt the utter relief of an unexpected ceasefire from the First Order and all things reminiscent of the Empire.”

Rey opened her mouth to ask clarification, but Leia continued.

“And how long have you been with us? Here, on D-Qar?”

Rey felt these riddles begin to lock into place as she quietly responded. “About six months, I would say.”

That smile broadened, though it didn’t reach all the way to her eyes. “And I’d say it’s been about six months that we’ve had nothing but absolute hell from the other side of the galaxy. Exactly to the day since you showed up on our doorstep with Tal, in fact.”

Rey couldn’t hold her gaze any longer and instead stared hard at the brushed durasteel of the General’s desk. “Yes, ma’am.”

Rey nearly jumped away when a hand reached across the table and gently lifted her chin. The smile that had been slowly blooming on Leia’s face was rooted in her knowing eyes, now. Complete and warmed by the sun.

“Your dreams are vivid, aren’t they? Painfully so?”

Rey could only nod.

“That’d be the pomegranate. I’d say I didn’t believe in the small magic of things like that, but knowing the Force like I do, I don’t have that luxury.”

Rey didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to ask and so nurture this seed further. So, instead, she posed an answer.

“I have to go to him. I have to go back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please drop a comment and let me know what you think. I welcome any and all feedback. Final installment coming soon!


	4. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for the wonderful feedback you've given on this. I was going to try to make it through the weekend before posting this last chapter, but I wasn't able to! I hope you enjoy this conclusion and please let me know what you think below!

**Epilogue**

**Rey’s second flight was easier. She knew** the controls well enough this time to dock in the Underground bay almost unnoticed. But they did notice her. When she walked down the ramp to the sterile cold of the bay, every head, helmeted or not, turned in her direction. Some with more tact turned away quickly, but most watched her as she strode confidently past. She deserved as much. For as much trouble as Kylo Ren had caused the Resistance, she was sure the Underground suffered tenfold.

She went to his rooms first, then the training arena, and her old quarters. She half supposed she wouldn’t find him in any of these places, and she was correct. 

So she walked to the garden. 

It was hardly recognizable.

It was wild. Overgrown. Plants encroached upon and choked out other plants. Fruit rotted on the ground from falling in too-great numbers from over encumbered trees. The green was stifling and reached up the walls and out the doors. 

In the middle of it stood an unmasked Kylo Ren.

Winter.

Ben.

His back was to her and his hands were fisted in his hair. Vines were snapping and twining over his boots, splitting and forking and becoming more and more tangled. The garden was chaos, much like its keeper.

Rey tugged off her shoes, then pulled her dream, _their dream_ , in around them. Her standard issue Resistance fatigues flowed into white linen. Brass bangles tinkled against each other on her wrists and ankles as she picked her way over the crisscrossing brambles. She reached a hand out toward him, brass rings on her fingers, and buried these fingers deep in the fur of the black pelt at his shoulder.

“Winter.”

He turned toward her, fever-bright eyes shining. “Spring?”

He looked half-mad. He looked like the boy scratching his skin raw. He looked like death, not its ruler.

“Am I dreaming?” he asked, and tears fell to punctuate his words.

“No, love. No.” She reached up to him, held his face in her hands, and he turned his head in to plant a kiss on her palm, damp and hot and frantic. “I’m here.”

He pulled her into him and kissed her six months’ worth, his mouth hard and wet on hers. Off-center and insistent, like his heart. He was pulling the rings from her fingers, the bangles from her wrists. They hit the foliage strewn ground in small pings, one after another.

“No dream, Spring. I want you. Just you.” He tore the fur pelts from his shoulders, tugged at her linen dress. He bared one of her shoulders and marveled at the new scattering of freckles, the faint stain of a tan on her skin. She’d known the light of a summer’s day while she was away, her desert conditioned skin steeping like tea in the sun. His hands trembled as he brushed fingers over this change, a shaking sigh not unlike a sob tracing over her skin as well.

“I learned another name for you while I was away, Jedi Killer.”

He sucked in a hard breath between his teeth, his thumb worrying over the firm slope of her shoulder, again and again until pink bloomed among the brown and freckle.

“There are those that would still call you Ben,” she whispered, laying her hand over his. 

He shook his head, setting again to undress her. Lips hard at her neck, planting bruises like purple flowers down the footpath of her throat. He pulled her dress from her body. His eyes drank her in, as if he wanted to see the parts of her where the sun couldn’t touch. He ran his tongue over the swell of her breast and spoke directly against her skin.

“Ben is dead. He was killed a long time ago by a god who knew better.”

When he cupped her shoulder blades in his hands and drew a small breast wholly into his mouth, her words broke over her pleasure like waves on jagged rocks. “A god--Kylo Ren?”

He released her, mouth travelling lower and large, steady hands drawing her to her knees, then to her back, in the cool green of the garden bed. “Kylo Ren is no god,” he said as his lips trailed over her stomach. His nose nudged her navel as he kissed the slight soft swell of skin that settled just below it.

She laced her fingers through his hair as shifted lower, his hot breath washing over her skin and revealing where he intended to kiss her next.

“Who then?” she asked as his mouth settled on her, finding her wet and already shaking with early tremors. He didn’t answer her, but rather dipped his tongue down and _in._ He anticipated the arch of her body and slipped sure, steady fingers around her hips and to the small of her back, supporting her, but also holding her in place beneath him. 

Rey half expected punishment for her six month absence, for him to coax regret from her for leaving him with his mouth and hands. Make her wait, like he waited. Make her want, though she had wanted from the moment she had walked out the door of that interrogation room. But she instead found relief, ripe and frantic. He was generous with his mouth, with his hands, inviting her-- _encouraging her--_ to come quickly and often. Long fingers curling, reaching into her and drawing out her pleasure like a silver thread.

When the thread threatened to snap, she pulled him back up her body, though his hulking mass was stubborn to obey her tugging hands. When she found his lips again, they were warm and damp and dusky tasting. She arched beneath him, all the more aware of how much clothing he still wore as it scratched along her oversensitive, naked flesh. She expected again to have to persuade him out of his clothes, to beg what little of his body he would give to her. He was always generous with her pleasure, but not his own. Never his own.

But he pulled layer after layer of black cloth from his body, taking a moment between each to kiss her shoulder and touch her waist, her cheek, her hair. Checking in and reestablishing a connection to her body before pulling more clothes from his own. And when he was bare, settling down on her for the briefest moment, long enough to hook his arm around her back and pull her on top of him as he laid down in the twisting green.

Her knees fell naturally to the outside of his hips, and his hands settled softly on her thighs. Her toes tangled in the soft shoots of seedlings that sprouted fresh with each of her shuddering breaths. She was slick against him, and he was hard and so hot. 

She knew she only had to shift her hips and he would slide so easily into her. But she wasn’t sure how they had gone from standing to lying, clothed to terrifyingly naked. She’d shared a thousand intimacies with the man beneath her, but never this one. She couldn’t seem to breathe deeply enough; she steadied herself with hands splayed on his broad white chest. Looking down at his body, his breathing just as ragged as hers.

Her eyes trailed up until they met his own, and she stuttered a helpless sound at the look of his hard, unflinching beauty. His eyes could have been watching her for a thousand years for how set they were on her face, and she realized that he likely had. All this time while she shuddered and squirmed on top of him, trying to find the courage to finish what he had started on a pallet in the sand over a year before, he watched her, steady and sure. And now he sat up, causing their combined heat and wet and hard to shift and spark pleasure up her spine. His hands trailed up from her thighs and settled at her waist, as if prepared to pull her from him, or down onto him.

“Kylo Ren is no god. Perhaps only a Titan wielded by those who know better.” He kissed the underside of her jaw, and shifted again, drawing a gasp, a moan from Rey’s lips. “But you--” he kissed her chin, her top lip, the fragile skin beneath her eye, “--you are a goddess. Spring itself. A flower blooming on a stone wall and a wroshyr tree in a rainstorm.” His hands at her waist lifted her, moved her, and she could feel. _She could feel._ A deep and affecting stretch, a fullness that was dull and sharp at the same time. 

Her fingers in his hair pulled tighter, his head falling to her shoulder, and a sound danced on her lips. One of his names--Winter, Kylo Ren, Jedi Killer--

“-- _Ben.”_

He shuddered and moved slowly within her, and she rocked further up onto her knees to match him. He was making little sounds against her shoulder, helpless and almost pleading. Not the sounds of a God, or of a Titan, or even a knight. The sounds of a man, a lost soul looking for a way to the surface and out of the Underground. 

“He's dead,” he whispered as he jerked beneath her, a release that was quick in the making. How he could claim his own death while affirming life as he came within her, she didn’t understand. The way his body shuddered, the heat she felt as he quaked beneath her was vibrantly, definitively _alive_ and _human._ She rolled against him, wanting to draw this out, finding her own pleasure and so enjoying his. 

“Snoke killed him and I am glad for it.”

He tried to draw away from her, but she wouldn’t let him, pulling her legs forward to wrap around his waist and digging her fingers into his sweat-slicked back. He made a sound of frustration at her attempt to keep him still and reached a hand between them, rubbing viciously against that part of her that knew nothing but _reaction_.

She bowed against him, teeth setting into his shoulder as he drove her hard and fast, summoning another climax while he was still half-hard inside her. “Ben--please--”

“Don’t, Rey.” He laid her back on the ground, not pulling from her body, as he continued to move his fingers on her. He rolled his hips, and the feeling of him within her and against her had Rey arching off the ground. He felt different now, still a presence within her but _less._ With each push of his hips against her, however, with each flicker of his fingers and hitching of her breath, she could feel him more and more. He was rising to her again, and she breathed deep to stave off the climax he so badly wanted to punish her with. She wanted him to fall with her. She was done with leaving him behind.

“Dammit, Spring!” he growled as he realized. He leaned lower over her, his eyes intense and his slick fingers insistent.

She cried out, but frantically shook her head. “Not without you, Ben.” 

“S-stop.” His hand left her as he collapsed to his elbows, driving fervently into her. He was close and she was--she was--

She muffled her scream in his shoulder, his name a final, violent cry from her lips. He followed quickly after, sounding angry, sounding broken. But he didn’t tear away. He rather collapsed onto her, so heavy and encompassing, and yet she gripped him to her until her arms shook.

“Can’t I just be your Winter, Rey?” He spoke into her fallen hair, his breath hot and ragged. “You’re my Spring. Why must I be Ben again?”

She could feel the newly sprouting green beneath her begin to settle, slowing with her steadying heart rate. She spoke to the high ceiling dripping with flowering vines. “Is that what you want?”

He nodded against her, shifting to hold her though she was so small beneath him already. “It is.”

She tugged lightly at his hair, pulling his face to hers. She kissed him, quick and deep. “Very well. But you aren’t Kylo Ren, either. He stays in the Underground, and you and I leave him behind.”

His eyes were steady on her, that full mouth in an impossibly hard line. “It’s not as easy as all that.”

“It never is,” she agreed. “But it’s my bargain.”

He searched her face, as if looking for another option, but sighed and nodded. 

“Just Winter, then,” he said, slow and decisive.

She kissed the corner of his mouth and took as deep a breath as she was able. 

“My Winter.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so very much for reading. Please take a moment to let me know what you think! I appreciate it more than you know!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Girl Called Spring](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8156885) by [SouthSideStory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthSideStory/pseuds/SouthSideStory)




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